Fugger Family

From the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, the Fuggers of Augsburg were among the leading merchant-bankers of Europe. As the term merchant-bankers suggests, the family firm combined long-distance trade and financial services. The key to the Fuggers’ wealth was the marketing of Tyrolean and Hungarian copper and silver in return for loans to the rulers of the mining areas. The company operated a far-flung network of agencies and offices in major commercial cities such as Venice, Antwerp, Lisbon, and Seville; provided credit and banking services to the Habsburg emperors, the popes, and other European princes; and established sporadic ties with India and the New World. As information brokers, they collected newsletters from all over Europe and supplied relatives and princely clients with up-to-date information on political and military events. As Augsburg’s wealthiest mercantile family, the Fuggers also influenced the social and cultural life of the imperial city in various ways: They commissioned some of the earliest Renaissance buildings and artworks north of the Alps and initiated a major social housing project that is still in existence 500 years after its founding. As stalwart Catholics in a city that had largely turned Protestant during the Reformation, they ensured the survival of Catholicism by exerting their political influence and supporting religious orders, especially the Jesuits. The Fuggers’ influence also extended to neighboring territories: they not only extended loans to the Dukes of Bavaria, but also advised them on artistic matters and played an important role in the transfer of the aesthetic tastes of the Italian Renaissance to South German courts. Finally, the Fuggers exemplify the possibilities for social mobility in Renaissance Germany. Descendants of a rural weaver who had moved to Augsburg in 1367, they not only entered the highest echelon of urban society, the patriciate, in 1538, but even rose into the ranks of the imperial nobility, becoming hereditary counts in 1530, forming marital alliances with Bavarian and Austrian noble families, and purchasing extensive stretches of landed property. On the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, their territories comprised more than one hundred villages in eastern Swabia. While the Fuggers are frequently mentioned in textbooks and general overviews of the Renaissance and Reformation, scholarship is largely confined to German-language works. This article reflects the preponderance of literature in German while giving due credit to the works of French, British, and American scholars and to translations.

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